A Pound of Flesh
A first-person body horror game about what work takes from you
IN DEVELOPMENT · MECHANICS-FIRST PROTOTYPE · PROGRAMMER ART
A Pound of Flesh is my creative response to the brutality of the games industry job market. You harvest meat in an underground industrial complex to meet escalating quotas, finding and cutting it from carcasses with a knife and a 2D diagrammatic interface. The horror reveal is that you can also harvest from yourself. Across five episodes, each a level deeper, conditions worsen and the population thins until, by episode five, the system expects you to die.
The design goal is specific: make the player feel helplessness, dread, and the slow normalisation of self-destruction through work. Through mechanics, not cutscenes.
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Role: Solo (design and all code)
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Engine: Godot 4 (GDScript)
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Genre: First-person body horror
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Aesthetic: Lo-fi, Paratopic-inspired
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Status: Core mechanics playable; scenes and art to come
WHAT I DID
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Designed the entire game: the core harvesting loop, the quota and weight-estimation systems, the self-harvest tradeoffs, the five-episode structure, and the NPC roster.
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Wrote all the code in GDScript: the harvesting interface and its 2D diagrammatic UI, the quota and mastery systems, inventory, movement penalties, and the systems that tie skill progression to bodily cost.
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Own the production end to end: scoping a five-episode solo project to a lo-fi aesthetic that keeps it shippable, and playtesting and balancing every system myself.
Design Decisions
A risk/reward loop with no clean solution. Over-delivering on a quota raises the next one permanently, but meat weight can only ever be estimated, never known. Every delivery is a gamble, and playing "well" makes the game harder. The system is the theme.
Punishment that is silent and unexplained. The over-delivery penalty is never tutorialised or surfaced in UI. The player is trusted to feel the squeeze before they understand it, the same way burnout works.
Skill that costs your body. Weight estimation accuracy is tied to a mastery stat that improves with use, including use on yourself. You get better at the job precisely as the job consumes you.
Two ways to self-destruct, mechanically distinct. Mirror harvesting causes minor debuffs but requires travelling to a fixed location, a chokepoint that doubles as a horror device. Leg harvesting is available anywhere but causes major movement penalties and forces healing items into inventory slots that could carry meat, compressing your options over time.
An NPC roster as a thesis statement. The opening introduces characters who each map a different psychological response to an unwinnable system: denial, grind, gallows humour, quiet exit. The game doesn't judge any of them.
Scope as an aesthetic choice. The lo-fi look isn't a limitation I'm apologising for; it's load-bearing. It keeps a five-episode solo project shippable and suits the game's flat, institutional dread.
Gallery
Where it's at:
The core loop is implemented and playable with programmer art: the harvesting interface, quota system, weight estimation, and self-harvest tradeoffs. Next up: the episode-one environment and the NPC introductions.